Predator Nation

There is a section near the end of Charles Ferguson's new book, Predator Nation, that rang a lot of bells for me. The section is entitled “The Ultimate Insult: The Financial Penalty for Being Decent.”

Ferguson's main theme in the book is the perpetration of financial crime by high-income, high-education people in the US and in this chapter he is speaking of a certain consequent damage this has done which is rarely discussed, at least in public. He says of decent people:

Often they go along with the system, but they hate themselves for it. They play the game to survive and feed their families, but they and society suffer for it. In America, the issue is rarely mentioned in public or in the media, but in my personal experience it is increasingly discussed in private conversation.

I have a lot of feel for what Ferguson is talking about here and it deserves far deeper and more extensive treatment than he gives it.

Just seeing someone mention it in a mainstream book was a bit shocking as well as heartening to me. In fact, just seeing anyone even mention the problem was shocking and heartening. A fundamental issue is involved and I have just assumed that people have read Thoreau ("You must get your living by loving") and so many other authors who have earnestly recognized it and struggled with the serious, primary reality of it.

My very first take on this “Ultimate Insult” section of the book was that “insult” is the very least part of it, if a part of it at all, although there is probably more to that than I have realized. But the damage it does to youth who are loving and trusting and decent and hopeful seems a far greater horror than any “insult.” It's amazing to me that people can bring children into the world, to have babies, in view of the horror of the situation. “How can I bring a child into such a world?”

And it's not just that “the worst people have risen to the top” and exploited the “decent:” they want to destroy the “decent,” too. There is a positive animus against the existence of the poor and decent.

Isaiah comes to mind now, Mother Julian of Norwich, and there are many others who have seen through it all and glimpsed the Promised Land. I suppose it is the problem of Job and the problem of theodicy, way way beyond me, and yet somehow just speaking of it with you feels like it has a clue to the solution!